Meeting Cost Calculator

The math is simple: cost = attendees × hourly rate × duration in hours. A worked example: 5 people × $75 per hour × 1 hour = $375. That same meeting held weekly costs $19,500 per year, and held every workday it costs $93,750 per year. Nothing about the formula is exotic, which is exactly why the results are so uncomfortable.

If you know salaries instead of hourly rates, convert with: hourly rate = annual salary / 2,080. That figure comes from a standard full-time year of 52 weeks × 40 hours. A $120,000 salary works out to about $57.69 per hour, and a $156,000 salary works out to $75 per hour. The calculator has a toggle that does this conversion for you.

Keep in mind this is the floor, not the ceiling. Salary alone understates what an hour of employee time costs a company, because benefits, payroll taxes, equipment, and office overhead sit on top of it. If you want a fully loaded figure, a common approach is to multiply salary by roughly 1.25 to 1.4 before converting to hourly.

Meetings are one of the few company expenses nobody has to approve. Buying a $375 piece of software usually needs a manager's sign-off, sometimes a procurement form. Booking a $375 meeting needs a calendar invite. The payroll cost is real either way, but it never shows up on an invoice, so nobody sees the burn.

The cost also hides because it is split across people. Each attendee gives up one hour, which feels small individually. Only when you add the hours together, the way this calculator does, does a routine status call reveal itself as one of the more expensive line items of the week. Recurring meetings make it worse: a standing invite is a decision made once that spends money indefinitely, without anyone re-deciding it.

Every lever in the formula is a lever you can pull. Invite fewer people: each attendee you remove cuts the cost proportionally, and anyone who is "optional" on the invite is a candidate. Shorten the default: most calendar tools default to 60 minutes, but a 25 or 45 minute default cuts cost without cutting the agenda. Require an agenda: a meeting without a stated purpose and outcome tends to fill whatever time it was given. Move status updates to async: a written update read in two minutes replaces a round-the-table recap that eats twenty.

Scheduling itself is a hidden cost too. The email chains and Slack threads spent finding a time are unpaid meeting overhead. A group availability poll replaces that back and forth with one link, and our guide on how to find a meeting time that works for everyone walks through the process step by step. If your team spans time zones, the meeting time zone planner helps you avoid slots that force someone into a late night.

The point of pricing a meeting is not to kill meetings, it is to spend them deliberately. Some conversations are genuinely cheaper live: making a decision with real disagreement in the room, kicking off a project where shared context matters, giving sensitive feedback, debugging a problem together, or building trust with a new team or client. Ten emails that each take ten minutes to write and misread can cost more than one sharp thirty minute call.

A useful test: if the meeting produces a decision, an unblocked person, or aligned understanding that async could not deliver, it earned its price. If it exists to transfer information one way, it probably did not. Once you decide a meeting is worth holding, hold it well: right people, tight agenda, shortest workable duration, and a time slot that actually suits everyone. After it ends, an add to calendar link gets follow-ups onto calendars without another scheduling thread.